Jesusland Nostalgia

Here's a map that came via E-Mail from Noel.




Growing up in New Mexico, I was always at the perilous boundary of Jesusland. Our neighbors were fundamentalists, originating from somewhere in Louisiana and Winslow, Arizona. In the semi-rural suburban countryside outside Albuquerque, where distances were large, and therefore contacts were few, our biggest influences outside the family (and TV) came directly from them. I hazily remember Summer Bible school, which, oddly enough, featured little or no Bible study, but rather inexplicable projects featuring grape clusters we assembled from Elmer's glue, popsicle sticks, and purple marbles.

The woman who lived next door often sang full-voiced hymns at lunchtime, accompanied by her organ and Randy, her howling dachsund, while her goats managed to escape from their pens, and wandered unhindered over to our house.

There were a lot of loose animals in the 1960's. Indeed, one late-summer afternoon when I was six years old, a bull wandered from another neighbor's field through some open French doors into our living room, in order to escape the sun. I had heard on the school bus that bulls would charge if you made faces at them, so I unsuccessfully tried to provoke the bull until, tiring of the sport, I finally alerted my mother to the intruder, and she chased the hot beast out with a broom.

As kids, we used hoes to create roadways in the dirt, lay out city plats over the abandoned alfalfa fields, and built small cabins from discarded lumber and bricks, which we furnished with cast away rugs, old appliances, children's books, and, of course, the mandatory chimney. We made maps, struck currencies, and gave names to our various holdings. I called my domain "Great Britain." A portion of the empty field next door I dubbed "Holt", posthumously honoring Australia's Prime Minister, who was devoured by a shark in 1966.

When we weren't cooking toast over small campfires in the willow brush behind our houses, in the long narrow strip of land we dubbed "The Desert," we were cooking toast in our cabins. As I recall, there were a lot of unexplained fires in the old days.

Even though my father spoke Spanish and I have a Spanish last name, I identified more with my Anglo neighbors. We had immense dirt clod wars at the bus stop with the Spanish-speaking kids from up the road. The clods would burst with impressive dirt shrapnel sprays. It was great! The wars between Great Britain and Spain lasted until my sister, who had just entered the 2nd-grade, was clipped on the chin by a Spanish clod, and our parents finally intervened. After that, it was just low-grade guerrilla war.

In September, 1968, we were all hanging out at the Goat Pen. By this time, all the goats had disappeared, the place was in disrepair, and had become a neighborhood hangout instead. We would display our rock collections in the empty stalls, and buy and sell sea shells and quartz using our inflated currencies. For entertainment, we would clamber onto the roof, put small kids into large cardboard barrels (voluntarily of course - we were daredevils), and roll them off the top, just to see whether the rolling action mitigated the sickening impact to any extent.

The neighbor kids, who had been Wallace enthusiasts, suddenly endorsed Nixon for the presidency. I expressed surprise, and they said they had come to the conclusion that Wallace couldn't succeed, so they were going for the Republican Nixon instead. They said some disparaging things about Hubert Humphrey (or maybe it was vice versa) and the Great Goat Pen Debate of 1968 ensued. Harsh were words were said, and that was the last time I ever considered voting for a Republican for President.